I know it’s been said before, but how do women in this
culture learn to judge each other so harshly? As someone who has felt the sting
of judgment – for a million different perceived social and physical flaws – for
most of my life, I tend to think of myself as more compassionate than most. I
love it when I see body-positive messages and photos. Belly pudge
makes me smile and sit at ease, especially in those artsy nude photos aimed at
making you comfortable with how you look. I love touching my girlfriend’s
belly, kissing the gentle curve under it as it slopes down to her pubis,
resting my head on it when we cuddle on a couch, even pressing my own belly against
it. On her it looks stunning, real, comfortably lived in. A body that has a lot demanded of it and knows how to enjoy a beer with friends, to move with genuine laughter, to poke over waistbands with glee at how delicious and indulgent the world can be.
But I still find myself calculating the calories I’ve eaten
minus the amount of time I spent running. Really, it’s about getting in shape
and feeling good about myself more than the weight, I swear?
So I blushed with self-disgust when I found myself on
facebook, smirking in perverted satisfaction, as I saw that one of the “cool”
girls I went to high school with now definitely has a double chin, and arms
that are flabbier than mine. “At least I don’t have to tip my face awkwardly up
when I smile for a photo to avoid the evidence of too many doughnuts from
showing under my chin” I think to myself, suddenly feeling slightly less
insecure about the re-emergence of my love handles. “I can’t believe she didn’t
even lose the weight for her wedding – she looks so different!” I sneer. I
gloat a little.
But almost immediately other thoughts sneak into my mind.
What about my lover, the one who is so tall and slender that
she looks almost otherworldly? She has talked about previously being fat, we’ve
discussed our body image issues countless times. When I looked and found some
old photos of her, she was certainly bigger than she is now, maybe even to the
point of “plump” but far from the point of being debilitated from rolls of fat
or strained joints. Just a rounder face, a belly when she sat down and leaned
over – essentially, where I’ve spent a good deal of my life in the "overweight" category. I think she looks stunning now (although she doesn’t quite
believe it and insists on “getting toned.”). I quite honestly think that if her younger self could have carried the same confidence she can project now, she’d look just as stunning with
the other 40lbs she used to carry. I tend to go for women who have that extra softness to their bodies, she's an exception rather than a norm for me, but I would never tell her that because who needs to feel any more conflicting desires imposed on her body? It's hers to love, to learn to love, just as mine feels more beautiful when my lovers approve but is still ultimately mine to make peace with regardless of anyone else's presence or opinion. I think she's beautiful, and it's hard to see her in so much pain in regards to her body. Maybe it's because I often feel such deep pain at my feelings about my own body.
What if the girl who I’m judging on facebook, this person
who I hardly know and haven’t spoken to or seen in person in nearly a decade,
has been fighting those kinds of battles? Maybe she was bulimic in high school,
exercised compulsively to maintain that skinny figure. What if college brought
anorexia, or practically buying stock in laxatives? Maybe she was skinny and
mired in that deep despair of thinking that her weight was inversely
proportionate to her desirability, to her worth. Maybe this fuller figure is
not the result of some lazy moral failing, but is a hard won victory in the
fight to find happiness and contentment. As someone who has fought that same
fight, who continues to struggle between inhaling the contents of my fridge
late at night and the urge to vomit up everything that passes my lips without
the label of “healthy”, who the hell am I to judge? How do such ugly thoughts grow in my head in the first place, and what does that say about me? About the time and place that I live?
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